Cloud failure

The Cloud

Yesterday the ‘cloud' stopped working apparently due to a software update. It was going to happen and will happen again in the future. Not always because of bad actors but because the things we humans make break from time to time, technology is not magic, it is built by humans and the ‘wonderful' AI stuff still comes from human minds it is definitely not perfection.

People think that the ‘cloud' is some amorphous entity, a super unit, you hear businesses and politicians talking about the cloud like it has a presence. The cloud? It is simply a bunch of interconnected computers sharing the workload of an organisation, at the base is the same sort of technology that you have at home reading this made up of CPU's, RAM, Hard/SSD disks which run on electricity and need cooling and connections to the internet in order to do ‘stuff'.

When this cloud myopia started I was still doing professional software work, I told the people I was working for that just putting everything into the cloud was not going to resolve age old computer issues like backing up data, having disaster recovery plans or simply what do we do when the #$%##$# thing stops working. That shops stopped working is annoying, that airports and aeroplanes were affected is alarming. People, even knowledgeable computer science and administrators, do not understand what it is they are building when they fall into the cloud rhetoric.

Important systems should not be cloud based, sure use the cloud for general access, informational use and other non-critical operations but if it is important to keeping the business open, flights in the air, power distribution running etc then it needs to run on a ‘real' system not farmed off to a blob of compute capacity that is run by another organisation because they can only provide the capacity cheaper and make a profit by scaling and saving on expenses, like competent people.

The more everything is placed into one bucket the more likely someone kicking it over is likely to cause tremendous chaos and carried forward loss of life when critical systems fail. We have been directed on a path, people without the skill and those only concerned with the almighty dollar are going to eventually run us into a proverbial brick wall.

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